Social Search : The new search marketing paradigm

Prashanth Kumar, Director, Digital Strategies, Wunderman
A Tweet by user @cshirky caught my attention recently. In Twitter’s characteristic 140-character format, there was this gem of an insight. @cshirky said, “AMZN’s growth happens because it’s not a retailer with a web presence, it’s a search engine with a warehouse”. This simple statement set me thinking; hard!

Most of us in the communication industry have been around long enough to realize and appreciate the awesome power of search engine marketing. Few other avenues can match the immediacy, relevance, measurability and return on investment of an effective search marketing programme. World-over, corporations and individuals spend billions of dollars on pay-per-click advertising on search engines like Google and Yahoo (among several others) or on enhancing the ‘findability’ of their corporate and product websites through search engine optimization.

The social media revolution, however, is set to change all that. Forever! As social media channels mushroom, consumers gain access to more channels that allow them to share information, interact with others, trade opinions and evaluate offers. As a result, their information consumption patterns have undergone a tremendous change. No longer are they passive recipients of information that is ‘pushed’ out at them. No longer do they blindly trust whatever marketers pitch them. The social media enabled consumer has other, more credible, channels of information. Trouble is, conventional search marketing doesn’t reach them there.

Search engines thrive on spider food - content. And the usual suspects who provide regularly updated content of a high quality, that is widely read (and what’s more) well linked and referenced are predominantly social media websites. Wikipedia is almost always at the top of organic search listings. And increasingly, Facebook and Twitter are getting there as well. Compared to this, mini-sites and product-specific websites scarcely stand a chance.

But that’s not all! Most social networks nowadays have their own internal search tools. Technorati calls itself ‘the leading blog search engine’. Twitter Search is fast becoming the way to find the latest buzz on the micro-blogging supersite. Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn allow users to search for people using various parameters and Flickr even allows one to search for photos using tags, groups or people names. For every official search application, there are scores of third-party search tools available to serve just about every social media site.

Every consumer who is engrossed with social media and is spending time there is a consumer not reachable through conventional search marketing. And the numbers speak for themselves. Twitter has surpassed 14 million users in the US (as of April 2009), according to SocialTimes. Facebook had over 82 million unique visitors and Blogger recorded over 29 million unique visitors in May 2009 while LinkedIn had over 11 million unique visitors in the same month, according to Compete. All of these users spend, on an average, several minutes (or even hours) updating their profiles, interacting with friends, sending messages and increasingly, searching within the social network to find what they need.

This is where social search comes into the picture. The only way for big brands to reach out to the savvy social media user is to get themselves and their communication efforts within those social media channels. Some of the savvier brands are already using social media in innovative ways. Take Burger King for instance. They introduced the ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ as a Facebook application. The idea: Sacrifice 10 of your Facebook friends to get a free whopper! Considering that most people labour long and hard to add friends, this turned-on-its-head concept did surprisingly well. As of May 2009, over 60,000 friends had been sacrificed!

What about big ticket items? You would be surprised. In the automotive category, Chevrolet, Ford, General Motors and Honda are on Twitter. And how exactly do they use and benefit from Twitter? Scott Monty, the official Ford Tweeter says, “It’s part of a larger social media strategy to humanize the Ford brand and put consumers in touch with Ford employees”. How is that for customer service through social media channels?

How about traditional media? Like say, a cable service provider? You would be surprised to learn that Comcast is leading the way when it comes to having conversations on social media. So much so that the New York Times even did a story featuring them! Frank Eliason (@comcastcares) says the endeavour has two benefits, “First, it is meeting customers where they are and second -- as we strive to improve the customer experience, feedback in social media is the story in the customer’s words. This is powerful.” And Dell’s crowd sourcing tactics on social media are the stuff of legend!

Closer home, several Indian brands too have jumped on the social media bandwagon. Here is a brief and non-comprehensive list of brand and businesses on Twitter:

# Newspapers: Daily News and Analysis (@DNAIndia), Bangalore Mirror (@BangaloreMirror), Live Mint (@LiveMint) and Indiatimes News (@IndiatimesNews)
# TV Channels: MTV India (@MTVIndia)
# Fashion Accessories: Fastrack (@Fastrack)
# Bollywood: Saawariya (@Saawariya), Gul Panag (@GulPanag), Mallika Sherawat (@MallikaLA), Preity Zinta (@preityzinta), Shahid Kapoor (@shahidkapoor), Priyanka Chopra (@PriyankaChopra), Rakhi Sawant (@rakhisawant)
# Politics: Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor)
# Automotive: Maruti Suzuki AStar (@mar_suz_astar)
# Cricket: Delhi Daredevils (@DelhiDaredevils)

The way forward then is to develop a social search solution that will help brands and marketers tap into this highly-involved, desirable target group. To be honest, the concept itself is not new. Social search, as a term, became popular in late 2004 and early 2005. A conventional search engine evaluates results on the basis of an algorithm that checks for items like link popularity and structure. Social search on the other hand determines the relevance of results by considering the interactions or contributions of users.

The web is filled with numerous examples of social search engines. While most of them ride on the popularity of social networking sites and concentrate in searching for information about individuals, there are a few which try and modulate conventional search. These include:

# Anoox.com, where people’s votes help determine the results;
# Gravee.com, which combines social bookmarking, tagging and voting to display results based on individual preferences;
# Sproose.com, which organises results based on the votes received by a link for a specific search term; and
# Zudos.com, which allows users to search for opinions about specific topics.

The catch is that very few brands are even aware of these specialized social search engines. As a result, they are losing out on valuable face time with critical user and audience groups. The social search engines could use a hand as well. Sites like Scour.com currently offer users the option of loyalty points (for comments, searches and votes and referrals) which can be redeemed through Visa gift cards. That in itself speaks volumes about how far away social search is from gaining critical mass. One thing is for certain. As adoption of social networks grows (and there are no indications to the contrary) these channels will assume more importance for marketers. Sites like LinkedIn have already started monetizing their inventory and Twitter too has begun walking the talk. The day is not far when real return on investment goes entirely social. The question is, how prepared are you?

Author’s Note: I would like to state that I have written this article in my individual capacity and this does not represent the views of my employer, Wunderman.